Not just in the US, but all over the world health care rationing is the norm, even if it doesn’t go by that name. Whether one gets care  mainly via private health insurance, payment out of pocket, employer’s clinic, or a national system, if there’s not enough money to give everybody A-one care something has to give.

Take a look at or listen to Public Radio International’s The World Rationing Health / Who Lives, Who Dies? . It is a collection of four articles/broadcasts (both text and audio are on line)  from four nations put together explicitly to put discussion of the topic in the US into broader context. David Baron organized the project. He reports from Zambia where a de-facto rationing in public HIV clinics comes via the near-endless sit in waiting rooms until it’s your turn, Patrick Cox reports from the UK where Nat’l Hlth System rationing is explicit (and under fire), Sheri Fink of Pro-Publica hopped on board from South Africa where local agencies devise their own systems to choose who gets care , and she also provides from India a counter-example of sorts. An ingenious doctor there, faced with a rationing imposed by shortages of supplies, put together cheap, hand-made medical equipment to save children’s lives.

The main deficiency in this is that there is no example of another front rank industrialized, highly developed, democratic nation that controls its health costs but without quite the explicit, open rationing that the UK has. How’s it work in Germany, Sweden, Japan….?

Nonetheless these few glimpses of specifics probably leave on most listeners and readers a far deeper lesson in global public health than a big, comprehensive, statistic-filled opus in which talking heads with fancy job titles wring their hands. Notable: The World, a PRI program co-produced with BBC and WGBH-Boston,  got some of the money for this from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

- Charlie Petit

This entry was posted on Friday, December 17th, 2010 at 12:23 pm and is filed under Health & Medicine Stories, Science Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.